How to Fix iMessage

[Henties]

Hi everybody and especially Jaymonkey for this excellent guide !

This weekend I decided once again to roll up my sleeves, get my hands dirty and have another attempt at iMessage. After working through this guide from top to bottom, spending a few hours just reading and making notes, it took me just over an hour to be able to celebrate SUCCESS. No support call, no nothing, I just logged in and voila iMessage worked.

In the end it took me much longer to get sound working after the switch to Clover.

Toleda has done a great job to make that possible. I just struggled to stitch the many pieces together that
I needed to have my sound sorted out again.

My system a GA-X58A-UD3R indeed suffers from the so called SId bug, but with this guide it was easy to
circumvent that nuisance. I also stitched together a serial number which is closely related to the iMac 12.1
system ID I am using. To round things up to keep all my "numbers" unique I used my macaddress for the rom number. The mlb number used is the one that Clover generated during the first reboot.

Throughout testing the machine was isolated from the internet. Now I must find myself something else to do, I may decide to do another machine a GA-EP45-UD3P, this thingy is rather vintage by todays standards however it still "plays" very well on my NAS network being OCed to 4.2 gigs and configured as a "thin client" with IP as the only protocol configured to access my NFS based NAS servers.

My configuration with all "numbers" has been backed up to remote servers so that I do not have to reinvent the "wheel" should the need ever arise in the future.

Greetings, happy hacking and keep up the excellent service that everybody involved with this has been providing. Without you I would have been lost completely as far as iMessage is concerned.

 

[jaymonkey]

After working through this guide from top to bottom, spending a few hours just reading and making notes, it took me just over an hour to be able to celebrate SUCCESS. No support call, no nothing, I just logged in and voila iMessage worked.

My configuration with all "numbers" has been backed up to remote servers so that I do not have to reinvent the "wheel" should the need ever arise in the future.

Greetings, happy hacking and keep up the excellent service that everybody involved with this has been providing. Without you I would have been lost completely as far as iMessage is concerned.

@Henties,

Nice to read you have been successful, and also good to read that you were able to use the old method (using MAC address as ROM) and it worked without having to contact Apple. Proves that either ROM injection methods should work as long as everything else is good.

The transition from a legacy boot-loader to Clover can be a bit of a learning curve for some, but there are plenty of guides on this and other sites to help, once you put in the effort to learn how to use and configure Clover you should be better off for future builds ...

Thanks for your feedback
Cheers
Jay

 

[stiligFox]

Just wanted to say - when I first built my Hackintosh a few months ago, it was during the whole Apple crackdown. Once that was over, I tried fixing it, but I didn't think to test the serial number - when I called Apple I gave them a serial number a Mac in Russia!

But just now I reset it - got everything working, and boy it worked great! Was able to log right in, no need to call Apple or anything. Followed the instructions both in this thread and also here: http://www.******.com/r/hackintosh/comments/2m81m0/lost_with_fixing_imessage_in_yosemite_using/

But if there is anything I'll say - ​CHECK YOUR SERIAL NUMBER WITH APPLE BEFORE CALLING!

 

[Henties]

Hi Jaymonkey and all the dedicated contributors to this iMessage topic.

Another one has bitten the dust, providing me once again with an opportunity to
celebrate until I am under the "affluence of incahol"

My GA-EP45-UD3P is now also iMessaging without having had to call Apple support.

Please note this board also suffers from the SId bug.

However I noticed some peculiarities with this machine.

Preamble

1. It took me many hours before I realized that years ago I disabled internet
communication by "apsd" through Little Snitch. After resolving this nuisance
I was up and running an hour or so later

2. Both of my hacks have, for a number of years now, been performing extremely
well and stable with Chimera/Chameleon files being resident in the EFI partition
of the respective opsys drive. Consequently, for me at least, it was not at all
problematic to switch from hfs EFI Chimera/Chameleon to msdos EFI Clover.
As a side note and contrary to the Clover guides floating around, the Clover EFI
partition can be initialized as msdos or hfs, Clover will work with both.
On this machine I opted for msdos, not really having applied my mind to it why.

3. All my computer cases have a "drive slipway" at the top of the box into which I
can slide in HDDs configured with an opsys of my choice - no need to open the
case to switch to another opsys or keep multiple HDDs with opsyses in the
machine just idling along, consuming power, wearing out, generating heat and
doing nothing most of the time. Unnecessary heat generation is definately not
desirable if one is overclocking a Q9550 on a LGA 775 socket to 4.2 gigs

4. For each machine running Yosemite I have 2 HDDs. Whenever I modify
anything I first make sure that both HDDs are working, so that I can always
revert to the HDD that is at that particular moment designated as my fully
functioning spare drive. I never touch this spare drive during any
experimentation in order not to break the "safety net" that I have so created.

5. Having chosen msdos for the Clover EFI partition presented a problem that
manifested itself only when I tried to clone the working HDD to the spare HDD.
CCC, or so it appears, is unable to clone msdos EFI partitions from one drive
to another, which meant I had to convert to Clover EFI twice with the peculiar
phenomenon that ONE and only ONE iMessageDebug value differs between the
two drives when I finished with the two "conversions" although I only used the
config.plist file, generated by my first conversion for both drives. This single
difference is persistent between reboots. All the other values remain identical
and the same between reboots.
More about this later.

End preamble.

Observation 1

The difference does not appear to affect iMessage, I can logout and login to
iMessage with either one of the 2 drives.

Only one iMessageDebug output line differs between the two drives and that is
the 3rd line from the bottom of the iMessageDebug output, all other outputs
are the same between the 2 drives.

On my other hack, the GA-X58A-UD3R, I do not have this difference between
the 2 drives, why I don't know as I used the same procedure in getting
the two drives working on both computers.

Observation 2

As stated earlier, for some years now, both machines have been running well
and extremely stable and reliable. Although different in architecture I
nevertheless originally configured both machines as iMac 12.1 hacks.
Doing this with Clover nevertheless caused other so called "inconsistencies"
which I am unable to interpret.

These are:

Board-id: This always seems to default to "Mac-942B5BF58194151B" when
choosing an iMac 12.1 in Clover, no matter what I do with the "juggler" buttons.

BoardSerialNumer: This always seems to default to "C02140302D5DMT31M" when
choosing an iMac 12.1 in Clover, no matter what I do with the "juggler" buttons.

However the other numbers differ as they were originally decided by me with the
help of this guide.

These being:

Serial number:
Harware UUID:
System-ID:
Rom:

Sorry for having been so longwinded with this dissertation, but my involvement in R&D, from which I retired many moons ago always demanded, from me and others,
to be meticulous with observations so that others may pick up the lead and add
their own findings in order to arrive at the "target/goal" with minimum effort, and thereby improve as well as minimize the cost of the anticipated result.

There are some other minor uncertainties which I will cover, if you permit, in
another post down the line.

Greetings and happy hacking.

 

[johndavidwright]

So I'm wondering if I'm doing anything wrong. I'm getting constant numbers when I run the iMessageDebug, my nvram.UUID.plist file name has the same UUID as listed in iMessageDebug. I keep getting the same Customer Code while trying to login to iMessage. Everything seemed to look ok, so I called Apple Support with my Customer Code and even that didn't fix it.

Did I prematurely call Apple and mess something up? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[esafeddie]

So I'm wondering if I'm doing anything wrong. I'm getting constant numbers when I run the iMessageDebug, my nvram.UUID.plist file name has the same UUID as listed in iMessageDebug. I keep getting the same Customer Code while trying to login to iMessage. Everything seemed to look ok, so I called Apple Support with my Customer Code and even that didn't fix it.

Did I prematurely call Apple and mess something up? Any help would be appreciated.

Hi - Your values has to remain constant at all times (between reboots) for iMessage/F-Time to work, any change in the values will induce disconnection and/or no connection to the iMsg/F-Time Services. Follow the GUIDE chapter 7.1 on how to inject you values manually without settling for the defaults settings of either Clover or Chimera its not that hard to do - again read the GUIDE.

Before you change anything remember to log out from iCloud, iTune also De-Authorise this mac, and the App Store. Another important practice, disconnect from internet until satisfied all values are constant between reboots.

After manually injecting the values, run iMessage DeBugger between a few reboots to insure the values or unchanged, if all is well, reconnect to the internet and you should be abled to log right in to iMsg/F-Time without the need to call Apple Unless there is a temporary block on your ID if that is the case, then you will have to put in that call to Apple with the code being thrown up - Good Luck.

 

[esafeddie]

Hi All - Happy to report no issues with the 10.10.3 update - The iMsg/F-Time Service continues to function as before.

 

[kochfoto]

@esafeddie First off I want to say thank for all your help, its priceless to the myself and the community. I'm still not there yet. I tried to follow the directions in 7.1 but did not have success. First I do not have a NVRAM.plist file in my Extra folder. Furthermore when I add the FileNVRAM.dylib file I can no longer boot up until it has been deleted. Running imessageDebug I'm getting a good System-ID a good Serial number, and a good Hardware UUI. For ROM and MLB I'm getting failed? Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks,

 

[esafeddie]

@esafeddie First off I want to say thank for all your help, its priceless to the myself and the community. I'm still not there yet. I tried to follow the directions in 7.1 but did not have success. First I do not have a NVRAM.plist file in my Extra folder. Furthermore when I add the FileNVRAM.dylib file I can no longer boot up until it has been deleted. Running imessageDebug I'm getting a good System-ID a good Serial number, and a good Hardware UUI. For ROM and MLB I'm getting failed? Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks,

If you are getting Failed for your ROM and MLB, there lies the problem - You need to inject these values manually. Jay has documented clearly in chapter 7.1 how to do this. Try this > disconnect from the internet > for your MLB add 5 random characters to your Serial Number so that it looks like this example CO2L67Y1F8JC45E15 to make it up to 17 characters.

For your ROM > try using your mac address and enter the values like this example > 75ce704aa26b or generate your SmUUID value in 'Terminal' and use the last 12 digits. All this information is contained in the Guide Chapter 7.1 and how to inject these values.
Good Luck.

 

[esafeddie]

Please people I am beginning to sound like a record stuck on repeat and its getting a little tiresome - Most of the problems some of you are reporting can be self solved. The 'How to Fix iMessage' GUIDE is very extensive and covers every possible fix to get iMsg/F-Time working on a Hack.

I can tell by some of the posts asking for help that the Posters either just glance at the GUIDE or don't bother at all but resorts to asking for a 'Walk Through'. I would advised all who are still having problems, to try the Basic method of ROM and MLB values (covered in the GUIDE) and how to manually inject these values to insure these values remain static between reboots.

Read People Read, then and only then you will have a greater understanding of fixing your iMsg/F-Time problems.